


some would sing and some would scream

by extasiswings



Series: all the ashes in my wake [4]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: (Not), Angst, Asher Flynn's A+ Parenting, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Insecurity, Pre-Series, The Author Regrets Everything, Timeless Fanfic Prompts, implied suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 10:32:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11667327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/pseuds/extasiswings
Summary: For the August Timeless Fanfic Contest. Prompt #3: Take any characters and describe the first time and the last time they did something together.What makes a monster?Is it magic? Is it sin? Is it something else altogether?What makes a monster?It’s not an easy question.





	some would sing and some would scream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PrairiePirate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairiePirate/gifts).



> I would just like to state for the record that my original plan for this prompt was cavity-inducing fluff with a side of smut for good measure. And yet, thanks to prairiepirate, I ended up with heavy angst and a side of crying into my keyboard at 1AM over my Family Flynn Feels. Rude. So rude. (Aka, posting this because if I have to suffer so do the rest of you. Mind the tags)

What makes a monster? 

Is it magic? Is it sin? Is it something else altogether?

What makes a monster?

It’s not an easy question.

* * *

Garcia Flynn is seven years old the first time he realizes something about monsters. Monsters—real monsters—are not the stuff of books and nightmares. They are not dragons setting cities alight, nor are they wild beasts in the woods, or witches, or goblins, or ghouls. No—monsters are men with faces set like flint and eyes like ice. Monsters don’t breathe fire or cast spells. The only venom they spit is through words, the only smoke they breathe thick puffs from tobacco pipes or cigarettes, more often than not cut through with the stench of alcohol. Their weapons are not claws or teeth or swords, but fists and belts and broken bottles that litter the floor with shards of glass.

Monsters are real. There’s one living under his roof. 

Garcia Flynn is seven years old when he first wishes he could be a hero. Heroes are brave and strong and righteous. Heroes slay the dragons, outsmart the witches. In the stories, heroes rescue princesses from the monsters, bring them to safety, make sure they live happily ever after. In the stories, it’s not the other way around. The princesses aren’t supposed to put themselves in between the monsters and the heroes. Princesses don’t have black eyes and bruises in the shapes of handprints on their arms. Princesses don’t spend the evening hours wiping away tears and dabbing at cuts with antiseptic while speaking in whispers so they don’t wake the monsters from drunken stupors.

If he were a hero, perhaps he would be less afraid. If he were a hero, perhaps he could save his mother.

Garcia Flynn is seven years old when he first decides he _hates_ his father. Coincidentally, that’s also about the time he swears to himself that he will never grow up to be like him.

* * *

_Dubrovnik, 2009_

“Can’t sleep?”

Garcia glances back at his wife and lifts a hand from where he’s been resting against the balcony to scrub at his face. There’s a chill in the air that had felt nice when he first stepped outside, but he can see the way Lorena shivers in her thin nightdress as soon as she leaves the doorway. 

“I’ll be fine,” he assures. “Go back to bed. Don’t worry about me.”

“ _Don’t worry about me_ , he says,” Lorena repeats, clicking her tongue in censure as she crosses the small space between them and wraps her arms around his waist from behind. “It’s the middle of the night and it’s freezing and you’re out here instead of in our bed. Of course I’m going to worry.”

“It’s nothing.”

Garcia doesn’t have to see her face to know she rolls her eyes at that.

“ _Nothing._ Honestly, dear, I’m your wife. I know when you’re lying to me by now—give me _some_ credit.”

The swell of her belly brushes against him when he turns to reciprocate her embrace, hoping to at least ward off some of the chill with his own body heat. Lorena leans into his warmth, her eyes fluttering closed when she rests her head against his chest. They stay there like that for a long moment, only the sounds of the night breaking the peaceful silence between them.

Eventually, Garcia takes a breath and releases it slowly before pressing his lips to Lorena’s hair. 

“I’m afraid,” he confesses, only barely loud enough for her to hear. She hums and slips her hands beneath the back of his shirt as she presses as close as her stomach will allow. 

“You’re going to be an amazing father, Garcia,” Lorena murmurs. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Garcia swallows hard and she steps back out of his hold far enough that she can reach up and take his face between her hands.

“Hey. Look at me.”

Reluctantly, he does. Lorena’s eyes are shadowed in the dark, but he can still see the softness in them.

“You’re not him,” she says firmly. “You never will be. Okay?”

 _I’ve done terrible things_ , he thinks. And he has. Terrible, monstrous things that may have been state-sanctioned, but the fact that he was only ever following orders hasn’t yet lifted the bloodstains from his soul.

The specter of Asher Flynn hanging over him loves to remind him of that fact. 

Of course, none of this is anything Garcia knows how to find the words to discuss, not even in the darkened early hours of the morning when shadows and silver moonlight should make it easier to strip away the masks that seem so necessary in the harsh light of day. And so, he kisses her instead of saying another word. 

Lorena sighs into the kiss, half-pleasure, half-exasperated _I know what you’re doing and it isn’t going to work_. But, she doesn’t pull away until a light gust of wind makes her shiver.

“Come back to bed,” she says, her fingers curling into the front of his shirt so he’s tugged along when she steps back towards the open door. 

“Lorena—”

She sways forward and catches his mouth again, this time punctuating it with a slow drag of teeth over his lower lip that makes his blood spark hot in his veins.

“Come _back_. To _bed_ ,” she repeats between kisses that could tempt even a saint from his musings. _Let me help you._

He goes.

(They talk more in the morning, in the seclusion of their bedroom. It doesn’t make him less afraid, but he sleeps better for the last few months of her pregnancy. And the first night in the hospital after the birth, as Lorena sleeps, he holds Iris in his arms and swears then and there that he will always, always protect her. Even, if it should ever come to it, from himself)

* * *

Iris Flynn is four years old the first time he checks her room for monsters before bed. Before that, if she had a nightmare, she would go to her parent’s room and climb in between them until morning. Garcia’s not entirely sure why that shouldn’t continue, but Lorena says something about needing to foster boundaries so he goes out and buys a water gun and a special bottle that he labels _Monster Repellent_ and a new tradition is born.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Iris asks as he pokes his head into her closet, under her bed, behind the curtains, and anywhere else he can think to “check” for monsters. From her tone, it’s clear that she has her doubts about the legitimacy of his methods. Garcia raises an eyebrow at her where she’s seated cross-legged in the middle of the bed and spritzes a round of “Monster Repellent” into the closet for good measure.

“Don’t you trust me?” He teases.

Iris makes a face and he laughs. 

“What if the monsters come when I’m sleeping?” She asks. “They might still come.”

Garcia kneels down next to the bed and reaches out to smooth the furrow in her brow. “Well, then I’ll protect you, okay? I’ll always protect you.”

That gets a flicker of a smile.

“I love you, papa.”

“I love you, too, sweet girl.”

It’s silly, perhaps. And he may overdo it some nights and have to address complaints that he’s not taking it seriously from his deeply unimpressed daughter while his wife presses her lips together so she won’t laugh and bring a similar lecture down on herself. But. There are mornings when he wakes up paralyzed by fear that he’s messing up this whole fatherhood thing terribly and there are nights when he looks at his daughter’s face and thanks god in every language he knows that her monsters really _are_ witches and goblins and ghouls and boogeymen under the bed. That she doesn’t know, that she doesn’t _have_ to know, what real monsters can be.

* * *

The last time...there’s an important point to be made about “last times.” Namely, that you don’t usually know the last time you’re going to do something will _be_ the last time until after the fact. If these things were always predictable, people could plan ahead, make sure to say everything they wanted to say, fix the parts of the encounter that they might have done differently if they had known.

But that’s just not realistic. 

Garcia Flynn expects the last time he checks his daughter’s room for monsters to happen when she’s seven or eight or nine—somewhere around the time where kids stop believing in the boogeyman and realize “Monster Repellent” is really just water and parents become more embarrassing than cool. But he’s wrong. The last time doesn’t happen when Iris is seven or nine or ten or twelve.

No. She’s five.

(Sometimes when he thinks about that he can still hear her voice saying _five and three-quarters, papa_ , entirely affronted in that way only small children can manage that he would short-change her age, even in his thoughts. Somehow that makes it hurt more)

Some nights are “double sweep nights,” aka the nights where Iris has nightmares and needs her parents to make absolutely positively sure that the monsters are gone before she’ll go back to sleep. The last night is one of those.

“I’ll stay up with her,” Garcia offers quietly when Lorena hides a yawn behind her hand after Iris is tucked back into bed.

His wife shakes her head, but rewards him with a smile for offering anyway.

“You’ve taken her the last two times this has happened,” she replies. “It’s my turn. Go back to sleep, love, you could use it.”

Garcia kisses her forehead, then moves to sit on the edge of the bed so he can do the same to Iris. She’s already heavy-lidded, although clearly still fighting sleep, but she grasps his fingers with a strength that almost surprises him from someone so young.

“If they come back, you’ll protect me?” She asks as she always does in one way or another.

“Always,” Garcia murmurs. “I’ll always protect you.”

(Later, he’ll prove himself a liar when muffled gunshots send him leaping out of bed and assembling his gun. Later, he’ll realize that he never should have let himself forget that monsters are real, that monsters are men with human faces and guns and bloody hands. Later, he’ll wish instinct hadn’t made him fight back when he’d heard the click of a gun after falling to his knees in Iris’s room, a click that made it clear he would be meeting the same end as his wife and daughter.

Later, he’ll try desperately to remember if he’d told them he loved them before going back to bed)

* * *

“You’re a bastard,” Garcia slurs two nights later, sitting on the cold, damp ground next to the simple stone slab reading _Asher Flynn_. His mother isn’t buried there—no, his grandparents had taken their daughter’s body back to Texas when she died and he hadn’t seen a reason to stop them—so it’s just the two of them. Father and son. If he were in the right headspace, he might almost call it poetic. 

Next to him on one side is his gun. On the other is a bottle of liquor that he’s fairly sure could be used as rocket fuel if necessary. When it tips, he lists to catch it before it can spill. 

“A real son of a bitch,” he continues. Christ, everything hurts. _Everything_. He didn’t think it was possible to hurt this much and not die. 

“I bet you’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Looking up from hell—does it make you happy to know you were right?”

Garcia lifts the bottle to his lips, then changes his mind and tips it out over the grave instead. 

“Turns out I’m just as weak as you always said I was.” 

He picks up the gun, turns it over in his hands. _It would be so easy…_

He takes a breath, closes his eyes— 

—then he flicks the safety on and shoves it back into the holster hanging lax at his side. 

“I want to kill them,” he says, and in this place, in the black of night, he’s not entirely convinced his conviction isn’t enough to summon some type of devil. Or maybe he can sell his soul to the demons in his head easily enough instead.

“I’m _going_ to kill them. All of them.”

The breeze picks up for just a moment then, and the way it hooks its claws into his clothing feels oddly like approval. _Go, then. Do it_ , it whispers. 

_I will._

He doesn’t know when, he doesn’t know how, but he will.

* * *

What makes a monster?

( _Grief? Vengeance? Rage?_ )

It’s not an easy question. There are many answers, many reasons, and sometimes you have to define what a monster is before you can understand them to begin with.

What _is_ a monster? 

Standing near the flaming wreckage of the Hindenburg, listening to screams and the crash and groan of twisting metal, all Flynn can think is:

_I am._


End file.
